ABSTRACT
Strasbourg represents the glow of dawn in Goethe’s life or, in the language of the pietists, the ‘break-through’, though it was not preceded by any long ‘battle of repentance’. ‘Rose-tinted spring’ or ‘the whole world heady with the scent of flowers’ is the imagery of his first mature poems. He finds himself in a new, rich, warm landscape and feels its glow as it suffuses the dullness of his being. The air, the clouds, the wide vistas, the mighty Rhine with its islands and islets, its sparkling waters not yet canalized: in his descriptions he has painted this with more love and care than any other landscape. There is a love affair, more serious now, with an Alsatian girl in long pigtails who wears the old national costume, and there are folk-songs and folklore that he has collected. This whole love affair is like a folk-song with its perfidy, parting and shunning of the loved one: after all it is Alsace, the country we meet even in German folk-song more often than any other. To all this we must add his first encounter with a mind superior to his own, one that ‘scours’ him unmercifully, as he puts it, that bears down on him until the proud young man feels himself to be no more than the humble satellite of some greater planet. Then he casts off the yoke, breathes again, and enters his first great creative epoch, an epoch that, in the exuberance of its genius, is to be the richest of his life.
